As the era unfolded, new cultural forms and a dynamic subculture which celebrated experimentation, modern incarnations of Bohemianism, and the rise of the hippie and other alternative lifestyles, emerged. This embracing of creativity is particularly notable in the works of British Invasion bands such as the Beatles, and filmmakers whose works became far less restricted by censorship. In addition to the trendsetting Beatles, many other creative artists, authors, and thinkers, within and across many disciplines, helped define the counterculture movement.

Several factors distinguished the counterculture of the 1960s from the anti-authoritarian movements of previous eras. The post-World War II "baby boom"[6][7] generated an unprecedented number of potentially disaffected young people as prospective participants in a rethinking of the direction of American and other democratic societies.[8] Post-war affluence allowed many of the counterculture generation to move beyond a focus on the provision of the material necessities of life that had preoccupied their Depression-era parents.[9] The era was also notable in that a significant portion of the array of behaviors and "causes" within the larger movement were quickly assimilated within mainstream society, particularly in the US.[10][11]

The counterculture era essentially commenced in earnest with the assassination of US President John F. Kennedy. It ended with the termination of US combat military involvement in the communist insurgencies of Southeast Asia and the end of the draft in 1973, and ultimately with the resignation of President Richard M. Nixon in August 1974.

Many key movements were born of, or were advanced within, the counterculture of the 1960s. Each movement is relevant to the larger era. The most important stand alone, irrespective of the larger counterculture.[12]

In the broadest sense, 1960s counterculture grew from a confluence of people, ideas, events, issues, circumstances, and technological developments which served as intellectual and social catalysts for exceptionally rapid change during the era.

The Cold War between communist states and capitalist states involved espionage and preparation for war between powerful nations,[13][14] along with political and military interference by powerful states in the internal affairs of less powerful nations. Poor outcomes from some of these activities set the stage for disillusionment with, and distrust of, post-war governments.[15] Examples included harsh Soviet Union (USSR) responses to popular anti-communist uprisings, such as the 1956 Hungarian Revolution and Czechoslovakia's Prague Spring in 1968, and the botched US Bay of Pigs Invasion of Cuba in 1961. In the US, President Dwight D. Eisenhower's initial deception[16] over the nature of the 1960 U-2 incident resulted in the government being caught in a blatant lie at the highest levels, and contributed to a backdrop of growing distrust of authority among many who came of age during the period.[17][18][19] The Partial Test Ban Treaty divided the establishment within the US along political and military lines.[20][21][22] Internal political disagreements concerning treaty obligations in Southeast Asia (SEATO), especially in Vietnam, and debate as to how other communist insurgencies should be challenged, also created a rift of dissent within the establishment.[23][24][25] In the UK, the Profumo Affair also involved establishment leaders being caught in deception, leading to disillusionment and serving as a catalyst for liberal activism.[26] The Cuban Missile Crisis, which brought the world to the brink of nuclear war in October 1962, was largely fomented by duplicitous speech and actions on the part of the Soviet Union.[27][28] The assassination of US President John F. Kennedy in November 1963, and the attendant theories concerning the event, led to further diminished trust in government, including among younger people.[29][30][31]

Many sociological issues fueled the growth of the larger counterculture movement. One was a nonviolent movement in the United States seeking to resolve constitutional civil rights illegalities, especially regarding general racial segregation, longstanding disfranchisement of blacks in the South by white-dominated state government, and ongoing racial discrimination in jobs, housing, and access to public places in both the North and the South.

The need to address minority rights of women, gays, the handicapped, and many other neglected constituencies within the larger population came to the forefront as an increasing number of primarily younger people broke free from the constraints of 1950s orthodoxy and struggled to create a more inclusive and tolerant social landscape.[37][38]

The availability of new and more effective forms of birth control was a key underpinning of the sexual revolution. The notion of "recreational sex" without the threat of unwanted pregnancy radically changed the social dynamic and permitted both women and men much greater freedom in the selection of sexual lifestyles outside the confines of traditional marriage.[39] With this change in attitude, by the 1990s the ratio of children born out of wedlock rose from 5% to 25% for Whites and from 25% to 66% for African-Americans.[40]

For those born after World War II, the emergence of television as a source of entertainment and information - as well as the associated massive expansion of consumerism afforded by post-war affluence and encouraged by TV advertising - were key components in youthful disillusionment and the formulation of new social behaviours, even as ad agencies heavily courted the "hip" youth market.[41][42] In the US, nearly real-time TV news coverage of the civil rights era's Birmingham Campaign, the "Bloody Sunday" event of the Selma to Montgomery marches, and graphic news footage from Vietnam brought horrifying, moving images of the bloody reality of armed conflict into living rooms for the first time.

The breakdown of enforcement of the US Hays Code[43] concerning censorship in motion picture production, the use of new forms of artistic expression in European and Asian cinema, and the advent of modern production values heralded a new era of art-house, pornographic, and mainstream film production, distribution, and exhibition. The end of censorship resulted in a complete reformation of the western film industry. With new-found artistic freedom, a generation of exceptionally talented New Wave film makers working across all genres brought realistic depictions of previously prohibited subject matter to neighborhood theater screens for the first time, even as Hollywood film studios were still considered a part of the establishment by some elements of the counterculture.

By the later 1960s, previously under-regarded FM radio replaced AM radio as the focal point for the ongoing explosion of rock and roll music, and became the nexus of youth-oriented news and advertising for the counterculture generation.[44][45]

Communes, collectives, and intentional communities regained popularity during this era.[46] Early communities, such as the Hog Farm, Quarry Hill, and Drop City[47] in the US were established as straightforward agrarian attempts to return to the land and live free of interference from outside influences. As the era progressed, many people established and populated new communities in response to not only disillusionment with standard community forms, but also dissatisfaction with certain elements of the counterculture itself. Some of these self-sustaining communities have been credited with the birth and propagation of the international Green Movement.

The emergence of an interest in expanded spiritual consciousness, yoga, occult practices and increased human potential helped to shift views on organized religion during the era. In 1957, 69% of US residents polled by Gallup said religion was increasing in influence. By the late 1960s, polls indicated less than 20% still held that belief.[48]

The "Generation Gap", or the inevitable perceived divide in worldview between the old and young, was perhaps never greater than during the counterculture era.[49] A large measure of the generational chasm of the 1960s and early 1970s was born of rapidly evolving fashion and hairstyle trends that were readily adopted by the young, but often misunderstood and ridiculed by the old. These included the wearing of very long hair by men,[50] the wearing of natural or "Afro" hairstyles by Blacks, the donning of revealing clothing by women in public, and the mainstreaming of the psychedelic clothing and regalia of the short-lived hippie culture. Ultimately, practical and comfortable casual apparel, namely updated forms of T-shirts (often tie-dyed, or emblazoned with political or advertising statements), and Levi Strauss-branded blue denim jeans[51] became the enduring uniform of the generation. The fashion dominance of the counterculture effectively ended with the rise of the Disco and Punk Rock eras in the later 1970s, even as the global popularity of T-shirts, denim jeans, and casual clothing in general have continued to grow.

In the western world, the ongoing criminal legal status of the recreational drug industry was instrumental in the formation of an anti-establishment social dynamic by some of those coming of age during the counterculture era. The explosion of marijuana use during the era, in large part by students on fast-expanding college campuses,[52] created an attendant need for increasing numbers of people to conduct their personal affairs in secret in the procurement and use of banned substances. The classification of marijuana as a narcotic, and the attachment of severe criminal penalties for its use, drove the act of smoking marijuana, and experimentation with substances in general, deep underground. Many began to live largely clandestine lives because of their choice to use such drugs and substances, fearing retribution from their governments.[53][54]

The Vietnam War, and the protracted national divide between supporters and opponents of the war, were arguably the most important factors contributing to the rise of the larger counterculture movement.

Jerry Rubin, University at Buffalo, March 10, 1970.

The widely accepted assertion that anti-war opinion was held only among the young is a myth,[64][65] but enormous war protests consisting of thousands of mostly younger people in every major US city effectively united millions against the war, and against the war policy that prevailed under five congresses and during two presidential administrations.

The counterculture movement took hold in Western Europe, with London, Amsterdam, Paris, Rome and West Berlin rivaling San Francisco and New York as counterculture centers.

Carnaby Street, London, 1969.

The UK Underground was a movement linked to the growing subculture in the US and associated with the hippie phenomenon, generating its own magazines and newspapers, fashion, music groups, and clubs. Underground figure Barry Miles said, "The underground was a catch-all sobriquet for a community of like-minded anti-establishment, anti-war, pro-rock'n'roll individuals, most of whom had a common interest in recreational drugs. They saw peace, exploring a widened area of consciousness, love and sexual experimentation as more worthy of their attention than entering the rat race. The straight, consumerist lifestyle was not to their liking, but they did not object to others living it. But at that time the middle classes still felt they had the right to impose their values on everyone else, which resulted in conflict."[66]

In the Netherlands, Provo was a counterculture movement that focused on "provoking violent responses from authorities using non-violent bait."[67]

In France, the General Strike centered in Paris in May 1968 united French students, and nearly toppled the government.[68]

Kommune 1 or K1 was a commune in West Germany, and was known for its bizarre staged events that fluctuated between satire and provocation. These events served as inspiration for the "Sponti" movement and other leftist groups. In the late summer of 1968, the commune moved into a deserted factory on Stephanstraße in order to reorient. This second phase of Kommune 1 was characterized by sex, music and drugs. Soon, the commune was receiving visitors from all over the world, including Jimi Hendrix.[69][70]

Oz Magazine was first published as a satirical humour magazine between 1963 and 1969 in Sydney, Australia, and, in its second and better known incarnation, became a "psychedelic hippy" magazine from 1967 to 1973 in London. Strongly identified as part of the underground press, it was the subject of two celebrated obscenity trials, one in Australia in 1964 and the other in the United Kingdom in 1971.[71][72]

In Mexico, rock music was tied into the youth revolt of the 1960s. Mexico City, as well as northern cities such as Monterrey, Nuevo Laredo, Ciudad Juárez, and Tijuana, were exposed to US music. Many Mexican rock stars became involved in the counterculture. The three-day Festival Rock y Ruedas de Avándaro, held in 1971, was organized in the valley of Avándaro near the city of Toluca, a town neighboring Mexico City, and became known as "The Mexican Woodstock". Nudity, drug use, and the presence of the US flag scandalized conservative Mexican society to such an extent that the government clamped down on rock and roll performances for the rest of the decade. The festival, marketed as proof of Mexico's modernization, was never expected to attract the masses it did, and the government had to evacuate stranded attendees en masse at the end. This occurred during the era of PresidentLuis Echeverría, an extremely repressive era in Mexican history. Anything that could be connected to the counterculture or student protests was prohibited from being broadcast on public airwaves, with the government fearing a repeat of the student protests of 1968. Few bands survived the prohibition; though the ones that did, like Three Souls in My Mind (now El Tri), remained popular due in part to their adoption of Spanish for their lyrics, but mostly as a result of a dedicated underground following. While Mexican rock groups were eventually able to perform publicly by the mid-1980s, the ban prohibiting tours of Mexico by foreign acts lasted until 1989.[73]

The US Civil Rights Movement, a key element of the larger counterculture movement, involved the use of applied nonviolence to assure that equal rights guaranteed under the US Constitution would apply to all citizens. Many states illegally denied many of these rights to African-Americans, and this was successfully addressed in the early and mid-1960s in several major nonviolent movements.[75][76]

Much of the 1960s counterculture originated on college campuses. The 1964 Free Speech Movement at the University of California, Berkeley, which had its roots in the Civil Rights Movement of the US South, was one early example. At Berkeley a group of students began to identify themselves as having interests as a class that were at odds with the interests and practices of the University and its corporate sponsors. Other rebellious young people, who were not students, also contributed to the Free Speech Movement.[77]

The New Left is a term used in different countries to describe left-wing movements that occurred in the 1960s and 1970s. They differed from earlier leftist movements that had been more oriented towards labour activism, and instead adopted social activism. The US "New Left" is associated with college campus mass protests and radical leftist movements. The British "New Left" was an intellectually driven movement which attempted to correct the perceived errors of "Old Left" parties in the post-World War II period. The movements began to wind down in the 1970s, when activists either committed themselves to party projects, developed social justice organizations, moved into identity politics or alternative lifestyles, or became politically inactive.[78][79][80]

The New Left in the United States also included anarchist, countercultural and hippie-related radical groups such as the Yippies who were led by Abbie Hoffman, The Diggers[93] and Up Against the Wall Motherfuckers. By late 1966, the Diggers opened free stores which simply gave away their stock, provided free food, distributed free drugs, gave away money, organized free music concerts, and performed works of political art.[94] The Diggers took their name from the original English Diggers led by Gerrard Winstanley[95] and sought to create a mini-society free of money and capitalism.[96] On the other hand the Yippies employed theatrical gestures, such as advancing a pig ("Pigasus the Immortal") as a candidate for President in 1968, to mock the social status quo.[97] They have been described as a highly theatrical, anti-authoritarian and anarchist[98] youth movement of "symbolic politics".[99] Since they were well known for street theater and politically themed pranks, many of the "old school" political left either ignored or denounced them. According to ABC News, "The group was known for street theater pranks and was once referred to as the 'GrouchoMarxists'."[100]

Opposition to the Vietnam War began in 1964 on United States college campuses. Student activism became a dominant theme among the baby boomers, growing to include many other demographic groups. Exemptions and deferments for the middle and upper classes resulted in the induction of a disproportionate number of poor, working-class, and minority registrants. Countercultural books such as MacBird by Barbara Garson and much of the counterculture music encouraged a spirit of non-conformism and anti-establishmentarianism. By 1968, the year after a large march to the United Nations in New York City and a large protest at the Pentagon were undertaken, a majority of people in the country opposed the war.[103]

Some local opposition to nuclear power emerged in the early 1960s,[113] and in the late 1960s some members of the scientific community began to express their concerns.[114] In the early 1970s, there were large protests about a proposed nuclear power plant in Wyhl, Germany. The project was cancelled in 1975 and anti-nuclear success at Wyhl inspired opposition to nuclear power in other parts of Europe and North America.[115] Nuclear power became an issue of major public protest in the 1970s.[116]

The role of women as full-time homemakers in industrial society was challenged in 1963, when US feminist Betty Friedan published The Feminine Mystique, giving momentum to the women's movement and influencing what many called Second-wave feminism. Other activists, such as Gloria Steinem and Angela Davis, either organized, influenced, or educated many of a younger generation of women to endorse and expand feminist thought. Feminism gained further currency within the protest movements of the late 1960s, as women in movements such as Students for a Democratic Society rebelled against the "support" role they had been consigned to within the male-dominated New Left, as well as against manifestations and statements of sexism within some radical groups. The 1970 pamphlet Women and Their Bodies, soon expanded into the 1971 book Our Bodies, Ourselves, was particularly influential in bringing about the new feminist consciousness.

The Stonewall riots were a series of spontaneous, violent demonstrations against a police raid that took place in the early morning hours of June 28, 1969, at the Stonewall Inn, a gay bar in the Greenwich Village neighborhood of New York City. This is frequently cited as the first instance in US history when people in the gay community fought back against a government-sponsored system that persecuted sexual minorities, and became the defining event that marked the start of the Gay rights movement in the United States and around the world.

San Francisco's flower children, also called "hippies" by local newspaper columnist Herb Caen, adopted new styles of dress, experimented with psychedelic drugs, lived communally and developed a vibrant music scene. When people returned home from "The Summer of Love" these styles and behaviors spread quickly from San Francisco and Berkeley to many US and Canadian cities and European capitals. Some hippies formed communes to live as far outside of the established system as possible. This aspect of the counterculture rejected active political engagement with the mainstream and, following the dictate of Timothy Leary to "Turn on, tune in, drop out", hoped to change society by dropping out of it. Looking back on his own life (as a Harvard professor) prior to 1960, Leary interpreted it to have been that of "an anonymous institutional employee who drove to work each morning in a long line of commuter cars and drove home each night and drank martinis ... like several million middle-class, liberal, intellectual robots."

As members of the hippie movement grew older and moderated their lives and their views, and especially after US involvement in the Vietnam War ended in the mid-1970s, the counterculture was largely absorbed by the mainstream, leaving a lasting impact on philosophy, morality, music, art, alternative health and diet, lifestyle and fashion.

In addition to a new style of clothing, philosophy, art, music and various views on anti-war, and anti-establishment, some hippies decided to turn away from modern society and re-settle on ranches, or communes. The very first of communes in the United States was a 7-acre land in Southern Colorado, named Drop City. According to Timothy Miller,

Drop City brought together most of the themes that had been developing in other recent communities-anarchy, pacifism, sexual freedom, rural isolation, interest in drugs, art-and wrapped them flamboyantly into a commune not quite like any that had gone before[118]

Many of the inhabitants practiced acts like reusing trash and recycled materials to build Geodesic domes for shelter and other various purposes; using various drugs like marijuana and LSD, and creating various pieces of Drop Art. After the initial success of Drop City, visitors would take the idea of communes and spread them. Another commune called "The Ranch" was very similar to the culture of Drop City, as well as new concepts like giving children of the commune extensive freedoms known as "children's rights".[119]

The popularization of LSD outside of the medical world was hastened when individuals such as Ken Kesey participated in drug trials and liked what they saw. Tom Wolfe wrote a widely read account of these early days of LSD's entrance into the non-academic world in his book The Electric Kool Aid Acid Test, which documented the cross-country, acid-fueled voyage of Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters on the psychedelic bus "Furthur" and the Pranksters' later 'Acid Test' LSD parties. In 1965, Sandoz laboratories stopped its still legal shipments of LSD to the United States for research and psychiatric use, after a request from the US government concerned about its use. By April 1966, LSD use had become so widespread that Time Magazine warned about its dangers.[120] In December 1966, the exploitation filmHallucination Generation was released.[121] This was followed by The Trip (film) in 1967 and Psych-Out in 1968.

Timothy Leary and his Harvard research team had hopes for potential changes in society. Their research began with mushrooms (psilocybin) and was called the Harvard Mushroom Project. The subjects for this research were convicts at the Concord Prison. After the research sessions, Leary did a follow up. He found that “75% of the turned on prisoners who were released had stayed out of jail”[122] He believed he had solved the nation's crime problem. But with many officials skeptical, this breakthrough was not promoted.

Because of the personal experiences with these drugs Leary and his many outstanding colleagues, Aldous Huxley (the Doors of Perception) and Alan Watts (the Joyous Cosmology) believed that these were the mechanisms that could bring peace to not only the nation but the world. Peace in a time of war, their timing seemed to be perfect. As their research continued the media followed them and published their work and documented their behavior, the trend of this counterculture drug experimentation began.[123]

Although these men were seeking an ultimate enlightenment, reality eventually proved that the potential they thought was there could not be reached, at least in this time. The change they sought for the world had not been permitted by the political systems of all the nations these men pursued their research in. Ram Dass states, “Tim and I actually had a chart on the wall about how soon everyone would be enlightened….We found out that real change is harder. We downplayed the fact that the psychedelic experience isn’t for everyone.”[122]

Leary and his team’s research got shut down at Harvard and everywhere they relocated around the globe. Their outlawish behavior and aggressive approach with these drugs did not settle well with the law. Officials did not agree with this chaotic promotion of peace.

Research with psychedelic drugs and those who conducted it, was a radical understanding for the vast majority of the world. However, it did create a change. A ripple of curiosity was created as a result and the wave is continuing to swell.

Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters helped shape the developing character of the 1960s counterculture when they embarked on a cross-country voyage during the summer of 1964 in a psychedelic school bus named "Furthur." Beginning in 1959, Kesey had volunteered as a research subject for medical trials financed by the CIA's MK ULTRA project. These trials tested the effects of LSD, psilocybin, mescaline, and other psychedelic drugs. After the medical trials, Kesey continued experimenting on his own, and involved many close friends; collectively they became known as "The Merry Pranksters." The Pranksters visited Harvard LSD proponent Timothy Leary at his Millbrook, New York retreat, and experimentation with LSD and other psychedelic drugs, primarily as a means for internal reflection and personal growth, became a constant during the Prankster trip.

The Pranksters created a direct link between the 1950s Beat Generation and the 1960s psychedelic scene; the bus was driven by Beat icon Neal Cassady, Beat poet Allen Ginsberg was on board for a time, and they dropped in on Cassady's friend, Beat author Jack Kerouac - though Kerouac declined to participate in the Prankster scene. After the Pranksters returned to California, they popularized the use of LSD at so-called "Acid Tests", which initially were held at Kesey's home in La Honda, California, and then at many other West Coast venues.

Underground newspapers sprang up in most cities and college towns, serving to define and communicate the range of phenomena that defined the counterculture: radical political opposition to "The Establishment", colorful experimental (and often explicitly drug-influenced) approaches to art, music and cinema, and uninhibited indulgence in sex and drugs as a symbol of freedom. The papers also often included comic strips, from which the underground comix were an outgrowth.

As numbers of young people became alienated from social norms, they resisted and looked for alternatives. The forms of escape and resistance manifest in many ways including social activism, alternative lifestyles, dress, music and alternative recreational activities, including that of throwing a Frisbee. From Hippies tossing the Frisbee at festivals and concerts to today's popular disc sports.[129][130] Disc sports such as disc freestyle, double disc court, disc guts, disc ultimate and disc golf became this sports first events.[131][132]

The Situationist International was a restricted group of international revolutionaries founded in 1957, and which had its peak in its influence on the unprecedented generalwildcat strikes of May 1968 in France. With their ideas rooted in Marxism and the 20th-century European artistic avant-gardes, they advocated experiences of life being alternative to those admitted by the capitalist order, for the fulfillment of human primitive desires and the pursuing of a superior passional quality. For this purpose they suggested and experimented with the construction of situations, namely the setting up of environments favorable for the fulfillment of such desires. Using methods drawn from the arts, they developed a series of experimental fields of study for the construction of such situations, like unitary urbanism and psychogeography. They fought against the main obstacle on the fulfillment of such superior passional living, identified by them in advanced capitalism. Their theoretical work peaked on the highly influential book The Society of the Spectacle by Guy Debord. Debord argued in 1967 that spectacular features like mass media and advertising have a central role in an advanced capitalist society, which is to show a fake reality in order to mask the real capitalist degradation of human life. Raoul Vaneigem wrote The Revolution of Everyday Life which takes the field of "everyday life" as the ground upon which communication and participation can occur, or, as is more commonly the case, be perverted and abstracted into pseudo-forms.

Fluxus - a name taken from a Latin word meaning "to flow" - is an international network of artists, composers and designers noted for blending different artistic media and disciplines in the 1960s. They have been active in Neo-Dadanoise music, visual art, literature, urban planning, architecture, and design. Fluxus is often described as intermedia, a term coined by Fluxus artist Dick Higgins in a famous 1966 essay. Fluxus encouraged a "do-it-yourself" aesthetic, and valued simplicity over complexity. Like Dada before it, Fluxus included a strong current of anti-commercialism and an anti-art sensibility, disparaging the conventional market-driven art world in favor of an artist-centered creative practice. As Fluxus artist Robert Filliou wrote, however, Fluxus differed from Dada in its richer set of aspirations, and the positive social and communitarian aspirations of Fluxus far outweighed the anti-art tendency that also marked the group.

The music of the 1960s moved towards an electric, psychedelic version of rock, thanks largely to Bob Dylan's decision to play an electric guitar at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival.[141] The newly popularized electric sound of rock was then built upon and molded into psychedelic rock by artists like The 13th Floor Elevators[142] and British bands Pink Floyd and the Beatles.[143]The Beach Boys' 1966 album Pet Sounds also paved the way for later hippie acts, with Brian Wilson's writing interpreted as a "plea for love and understanding."[144]Pet Sounds served as a major source of inspiration for other contemporary acts, most notably directly inspiring the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. The single "Good Vibrations" soared to number one globally, completely changing the perception of what a record could be. It was during this period that the highly anticipated album Smile was to be released. However, the project collapsed and The Beach Boys released a downgraded version called Smiley Smile, which failed to make a big commercial impact but was also highly influential, most notably on The Who's Pete Townshend.

Free jazz is an approach to jazz music that was first developed in the 1950s and 1960s. Though the music produced by free jazz composers varied widely, the common feature was a dissatisfaction with the limitations of bebop, hard bop, and modal jazz, which had developed in the 1940s and 1950s. Each in their own way, free jazz musicians attempted to alter, extend, or break down the conventions of jazz, often by discarding hitherto invariable features of jazz, such as fixed chord changes or tempos. While usually considered experimental and avant-garde, free jazz has also oppositely been conceived as an attempt to return jazz to its "primitive", often religious roots, and emphasis on collective improvisation. Free jazz is strongly associated with the 1950s innovations of Ornette Coleman and Cecil Taylor and the later works of saxophonist John Coltrane. Other important pioneers included Charles Mingus, Eric Dolphy, Albert Ayler, Archie Shepp, Joe Maneri and Sun Ra. Although today "free jazz" is the generally used term, many other terms were used to describe the loosely defined movement, including "avant-garde", "energy music" and "The New Thing". During its early and mid-60s heyday, much free jazz was released by established labels such as Prestige, Blue Note and Impulse, as well as independents such as ESP Disk and BYG Actuel. Free improvisation or free music is improvised music without any rules beyond the logic or inclination of the musician(s) involved. The term can refer to both a technique (employed by any musician in any genre) and as a recognizable genre in its own right. Free improvisation, as a genre of music, developed in the U.S. and Europe in the mid to late 1960s, largely as an outgrowth of free jazz and modern classical musics. None of its primary exponents can be said to be famous within mainstream; however, in experimental circles, a number of free musicians are well known, including saxophonists Evan Parker, Anthony Braxton, Peter Brötzmann and John Zorn, drummer Christian Lillinger, trombonist George Lewis, guitarists Derek Bailey, Henry Kaiser and Fred Frith and the improvising groups The Art Ensemble of Chicago and AMM.

Allmusic Guide states that "until around 1967, the worlds of jazz and rock were nearly completely separate".[162] The term, "jazz-rock" (or "jazz/rock") is often used as a synonym for the term "jazz fusion". However, some make a distinction between the two terms. The Free Spirits have sometimes been cited as the earliest jazz-rock band.[163] During the late 1960s, at the same time that jazz musicians were experimenting with rock rhythms and electric instruments, rock groups such as Cream and the Grateful Dead were "beginning to incorporate elements of jazz into their music" by "experimenting with extended free-form improvisation". Other "groups such as Blood, Sweat & Tears directly borrowed harmonic, melodic, rhythmic and instrumentational elements from the jazz tradition".[164] The rock groups that drew on jazz ideas (like Soft Machine, Colosseum, Caravan, Nucleus, Chicago, Spirit and Frank Zappa) turned the blend of the two styles with electric instruments.[165] Since rock often emphasized directness and simplicity over virtuosity, jazz-rock generally grew out of the most artistically ambitious rock subgenres of the late 1960s and early 70s: psychedelia, progressive rock, and the singer/songwriter movement."[166]Miles Davis' Bitches Brew sessions, recorded in August 1969 and released the following year, mostly abandoned jazz's usual swing beat in favor of a rock-style backbeat anchored by electric bass grooves. The recording "...mixed free jazz blowing by a large ensemble with electronic keyboards and guitar, plus a dense mix of percussion."[167] Davis also drew on the rock influence by playing his trumpet through electronic effects and pedals. While the album gave Davis a gold record, the use of electric instruments and rock beats created a great deal of consternation amongst some more conservative jazz critics.

The counterculture was not only affected by cinema, but was also instrumental in the provision of era-relevant content and talent for the film industry. Bonnie and Clyde struck a chord with the youth as "the alienation of the young in the 1960s was comparable to the director's image of the 1930s."[168] Films of this time also focused on the changes happening in the world. A sign of this was the visibility that the hippie subculture gained in various mainstream and underground media. Hippie exploitation films are 1960s exploitation films about the hippie counterculture[169] with stereotypical situations associated with the movement such as marijuana and LSD use, sex and wild psychedelic parties. Examples include The Love-ins, Psych-Out, The Trip, and Wild in the Streets. The musical play Hair shocked stage audiences with full-frontal nudity. Dennis Hopper's "Road Trip" adventure Easy Rider (1969) became accepted as one of the landmark films of the era.[170][171]Medium Cool portrayed the 1968 Democratic Convention alongside the 1968 Chicago police riots which has led to it being labeled as "a fusion of cinema-vérité and political radicalism".[172] One film-studio attempt to cash in on the hippie trend was 1968's Psych-Out,[173] which is in contrast to the film version of Arlo Guthrie's Alice's Restaurant, which some say portrayed the generation as "doomed".[174] The music of the era was represented by films such as 1970s Woodstock, a documentary of the music festival.[175](See also: List of films related to the hippie subculture)

In his 1986 essay "From Satori to Silicon Valley",[177] cultural historian Theodore Roszak pointed out that Apple Computer emerged from within the West Coast counterculture. Roszak outlines the Apple computer's development, and the evolution of 'the two Steves' (Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs, the Apple's developers) into businessmen. Like them, many early computing and networking pioneers - after discovering LSD and roaming the campuses of UC Berkeley, Stanford, and MIT in the late 1960s and early 1970s - would emerge from this caste of social "misfits" to shape the modern world.

In his 1991 book, Hippies and American Values, Timothy Miller described the hippie ethos as essentially a "religious movement" whose goal was to transcend the limitations of mainstream religious institutions. "Like many dissenting religions, the hippies were enormously hostile to the religious institutions of the dominant culture, and they tried to find new and adequate ways to do the tasks the dominant religions failed to perform."[178] In his seminal, contemporaneous work, The Hippie Trip, author Lewis Yablonsky notes that those who were most respected in hippie settings were the spiritual leaders, the so-called "high priests" who emerged during that era.[179]

One such hippie "high priest" was San Francisco State University Professor Stephen Gaskin. Beginning in 1966, Gaskin's "Monday Night Class" eventually outgrew the lecture hall, and attracted 1,500 hippie followers in an open discussion of spiritual values, drawing from Christian, Buddhist, and Hindu teachings. In 1970 Gaskin founded a Tennessee community called The Farm, and he still lists his religion as "Hippie."[180][181][182]

Timothy Leary was an American psychologist and writer, known for his advocacy of psychedelic drugs. On September 19, 1966, Leary founded the League for Spiritual Discovery, a religion declaring LSD as its holy sacrament, in part as an unsuccessful attempt to maintain legal status for the use of LSD and other psychedelics for the religion's adherents based on a "freedom of religion" argument. The Psychedelic Experience was the inspiration for John Lennon's song "Tomorrow Never Knows" in The Beatles' album Revolver.[183] He published a pamphlet in 1967 called Start Your Own Religion to encourage just that (see below under "writings") and was invited to attend the January 14, 1967 Human Be-In a gathering of 30,000 hippies in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park In speaking to the group, he coined the famous phrase "Turn on, tune in, drop out".[184]

The Principia Discordia is the founding text of Discordianism written by Greg Hill (Malaclypse the Younger) and Kerry Wendell Thornley (Lord Omar Khayyam Ravenhurst). It was originally published under the title "Principia Discordia or How The West Was Lost" in a limited edition of five copies in 1965. The title, literally meaning "Discordant Principles", is in keeping with the tendency of Latin to prefer hypotactic grammatical arrangements. In English, one would expect the title to be "Principles of Discord."[185]

The English magician Aleister Crowley became an influential icon to the new alternative spiritual movements of the decade as well as for rock musicians. The Beatles included him as one of the many figures on the cover sleeve of their 1967 album Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band while Jimmy Page, the guitarist and co-founder of 1970s rock band Led Zeppelin was fascinated by Crowley, and owned some of his clothing, manuscripts and ritual objects, and during the 1970s bought Boleskine House, which also appears in the band's movie The Song Remains the Same. On the back cover of the Doors' album 13, Jim Morrison and the other members of the Doors are shown posing with a bust of Aleister Crowley. Timothy Leary openly acknowledged the inspiration of Crowley.[186]

The lasting impact, including unintended consequences, creative output and general legacy of the counterculture era continue to be actively discussed, debated, despised and celebrated.

Even the notions of "when" the counterculture subsumed the Beat Generation, when it gave way to the successor generation, and what happened in between are open for debate. According to notable UK Underground and counterculture author Barry Miles, "It seemed to me that the Seventies was when most of the things that people attribute to the sixties really happened: this was the age of extremes, people took more drugs, had longer hair, weirder clothes, had more sex, protested more violently and encountered more opposition from the establishment. It was the era of sex and drugs and rock'n'roll as Ian Drury said. The countercultural explosion of the 1960s really only involved a few thousand people in the UK and perhaps ten times that in the USA – largely because of opposition to the Vietnam war, whereas in the Seventies the ideas had spread out scross (sic) the world.[187]

A Columbia University teaching unit on the counterculture era notes: "Although historians disagree over the influence of the counterculture on American politics and society, most describe the counterculture in similar terms. Virtually all authors—for example, on the right, Robert Bork in Slouching Toward Gomorrah: Modern Liberalism and American Decline (New York: Regan Books,1996) and, on the left, Todd Gitlin in The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage (New York: Bantam Books, 1987)—characterize the counterculture as self-indulgent, childish, irrational, narcissistic, and even dangerous. Even so, many liberal and leftist historians find constructive elements in it, while those on the right tend not to."[188]

The plaque honoring the victims of the August 1970 Sterling Hall bombing, University of Wisconsin, Madison.

Screen legend John Wayne equated aspects of 1960s social programs with the rise of the welfare state, "…I know all about that. In the late Twenties, when I was a sophomore at USC, I was a socialist myself—but not when I left. The average college kid idealistically wishes everybody could have ice cream and cake for every meal. But as he gets older and gives more thought to his and his fellow man's responsibilities, he finds that it can't work out that way—that some people just won't carry their load ... I believe in welfare—a welfare work program. I don't think a fella should be able to sit on his backside and receive welfare. I'd like to know why well-educated idiots keep apologizing for lazy and complaining people who think the world owes them a living. I'd like to know why they make excuses for cowards who spit in the faces of the police and then run behind the judicial sob sisters. I can't understand these people who carry placards to save the life of some criminal, yet have no thought for the innocent victim."[189]

Former liberal democrat Ronald Reagan, who later became a conservative Governor of California and 40th President of the US, remarked about one group of protesters carrying signs, "The last bunch of pickets were carrying signs that said 'Make love, not war.' The only trouble was they didn't look capable of doing either."[190][191]

The "generation gap" between the affluent young and their often poverty-scarred parents was a critical component of 1960s culture. In an interview with journalist Gloria Steinem during the 1968 US presidential campaign, soon-to-be First Lady Pat Nixon exposed the generational chasm in worldview between Steinem, 20 years her junior, and herself after Steinen probed Mrs. Nixon as to her youth, role models, and lifestyle. A hardscrabble child of the Great Depression, Pat Nixon told Steinem, "I never had time to think about things like that, who I wanted to be, or who I admired, or to have ideas. I never had time to dream about being anyone else. I had to work. I haven't just sat back and thought of myself or my ideas or what I wanted to do...I've kept working. I don't have time to worry about who I admire or who I identify with. I never had it easy. I'm not at all like you...all those people who had it easy."[192]

In economic terms, it has been contended that the counterculture really only amounted to creating new marketing segments for the "hip" crowd.[193]

Even before the counterculture movement reached its peak of influence, the concept of the adoption of socially-responsible policies by establishment corporations was discussed by economist and Nobel laureateMilton Friedman (1962), "Few trends could so thoroughly undermine the very foundation of our free society as the acceptance by corporate officials of a social responsibility other than to make as much money for their stockholders as possible. This is a fundamentally subversive doctrine. If businessmen do have a social responsibility other than making maximum profits for stockholders, how are they to know what it is? Can self-selected private individuals decide what the social interest is?"[194]

In the UK, commentator Peter Hitchens identifies the counterculture as one of the contributing factors to what he sees as the current malaise in British politics.[195]

In 2003, author and former Free Speech activist Greil Marcus was quoted, "What happened four decades ago is history. It's not just a blip in the history of trends. Whoever shows up at a march against war in Iraq, it always takes place with a memory of the efficacy and joy and gratification of similar protests that took place in years before…It doesn't matter that there is no counterculture, because counterculture of the past gives people a sense that their own difference matters."[196]

When asked about the prospects of the counterculture movement moving forward in the digital age, former Grateful Dead lyricist and self-styled "cyberlibertarian" John Perry Barlow said, "I started out as a teenage beatnik and then became a hippie and then became a cyberpunk. And now I'm still a member of the counterculture, but I don't know what to call that. And I'd been inclined to think that that was a good thing, because once the counterculture in America gets a name then the media can coopt it, and the advertising industry can turn it into a marketing foil. But you know, right now I'm not sure that it is a good thing, because we don't have any flag to rally around. Without a name there may be no coherent movement."[197]

Free Speech advocate and social anthropologist Jentri Anders observed that a number of freedoms were endorsed within a countercultural community in which she lived and studied: "freedom to explore one's potential, freedom to create one's Self, freedom of personal expression, freedom from scheduling, freedom from rigidly defined roles and hierarchical statuses..." Additionally, Anders believed some in the counterculture wished to modify children's education so that it didn't discourage, but rather encouraged, "aesthetic sense, love of nature, passion for music, desire for reflection, or strongly marked independence."[198][199]

In 2007, Merry Prankster Carolyn "Mountain Girl" Garcia commented, "I see remnants of that movement everywhere. It's sort of like the nuts in Ben and Jerry's ice cream -- it's so thoroughly mixed in, we sort of expect it. The nice thing is that eccentricity is no longer so foreign. We've embraced diversity in a lot of ways in this country. I do think it's done us a tremendous service."[200]

The following people are well known for their involvement in 1960s era counterculture. Some are key incidental or contextual figures, such as Beat Generation figures who also participated directly in the later counterculture era. The primary area(s) of each figure's notability are indicated, per these figures' Wikipedia pages. Although many of the people listed are known for civil rights activism, some figures whose primary notability was within the realm of the civil rights movement are listed elsewhere. (see also: List of civil rights leaders; Key figures of the New Left).

^Hirsch, E.D. (1993). The Dictionary of Cultural Literacy. Houghton Mifflin. ISBN 978-0-395-65597-9. p 419. "Members of a cultural protest that began in the U.S. in the 1960s and affected Europe before fading in the 1970s ... fundamentally a cultural rather than a political protest."

^Landis, Judson R., ed. (1973). Current Perspectives on Social Problems (Third ed.). Belmont, California: Wadsworth Publishing Co. p. 2. ISBN0-534-00289-7. Culture is the "social heritage" of society. It includes the complex set of learned and shared beliefs, customs, skills, habits, traditions, and knowledge common to the members of society. Within a culture, there may be subcultures made up of specific groups that are somewhat separate from the rest of society because of distinct traits, beliefs, or or interests.

^CTBTO. "1955–62: From peace movement to missile crisis". Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty Organization. Retrieved April 18, 2014. The international Peace Movement played an essential role throughout the Cold War in keeping the public informed on issues of disarmament and pressuring governments to negotiate arms control treaties

^Dobbs, Michael. "Cuban Missile Crisis (Times Topics)". The New York Times (New York, NY, US). Retrieved April 18, 2014. (JFK's) first reaction on hearing the news from National Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy was to accuse the Soviet leader Nikita S. Khrushchev of a double-cross

^"October 18, 2013 Public Trust in Government: 1958–2013" (Press release). Pew Charitable Trusts. www.people-press.org. October 18, 2013. Sources: Pew Research Center, National Election Studies, Gallup, ABC/Washington Post, CBS/New York Times, and CNN Polls. From 1976 to 2010 the trend line represents a three-survey moving average. For party analysis, selected datasets obtained from searches of the iPOLL Databank provided by the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research, University of Connecticut

^Smith, Lillian (1964). Our Faces, Our Words (First (pbk) ed.). New York: Norton & Co. p. 114. ISBN9780393002515. But there is something beyond rights, something not more important but more desperately urgent: bodily need. There are millions of Negroes in such desperate need in every town and country and city that talk of "rights" leaves them dull and dazed. The young protesters who come, in large part, from middle-class families have stumbled on this: to their stunned amazement they have found a primitive misery which pushes the phrase "civil rights" out of their vocabulary.

^"International Data Base World Population Growth Rates: 1950–2050". US Department of Commerce. Retrieved April 18, 2014. The world population growth rate rose from about 1.5 percent per year from 1950 to 1951, to a peak of over 2 percent in the early 1960s due to reductions in mortality. Growth rates thereafter started to decline due to rising age at marriage as well as increasing availability and use of effective contraceptive methods. Note that changes in population growth have not always been steady. A dip in the growth rate from 1959 to 1960, for instance, was due to the Great Leap Forward in China. During that time, both natural disasters and decreased agricultural output in the wake of massive social reorganization caused China's death rate to rise sharply and its fertility rate to fall by almost half

^Muir, Patricia. "History of Pesticide Use". oregonstate.edu. Oregon State College. Retrieved July 7, 2014. Then, things began to temper the enthusiasm for pesticides. Notable among these was the publication of Rachel Carson's best selling book "Silent Spring," which was published in 1962. She (a scientist) issued grave warnings about pesticides, and predicted massive destruction of the planet's fragile ecosystems unless more was done to halt what she called the "rain of chemicals." In retrospect, this book really launched the environmental movement.

^Mondello, Bob (August 8, 2008). "Remembering Hollywood's Hays Code, 40 Years On". npr.org. Retrieved April 18, 2014. ... It took just two years...for Midnight Cowboy to be re-rated from X to R, without a single frame being altered. Community standards had changed — as they invariably do

^"Flower Power". ushistory.org. ushistory.org/Independence Hall Association. 2014. Retrieved July 28, 2014. Like the utopian societies of the 1840s, over 2000 rural communes formed during these turbulent times. Completely rejecting the capitalist system, many communes rotated duties, made their own laws, and elected their own leaders. Some were philosophically based, but others were influenced by new religions. Earth-centered religions, astrological beliefs, and Eastern faiths proliferated across American campuses. Some scholars labeled this trend as the Third Great Awakening.

^"Ask Steve: Generation Gap (Video)". history.com. History Channel/A&E. Retrieved May 1, 2014. Explore the existence of the generation gap that took place in the 1960's through this Ask Steve video. Steve Gillon explains there was even a larger gap between the Baby Boomers themselves than the Baby Boomers and the Greatest Generation. The massive Baby Boomers Generation was born between 1946 and 1964, consisting of nearly 78 million people. The Baby Boomers were coming of age in the 1960's, and held different cultural values than the Greatest Generation. The Greatest Generation lived in a time of self-denial, while the Baby Boomers were always seeking immediate gratification. However, the Baby Boomers were more divided amongst themselves. Not all of them were considered hippies and protesters. In fact, people under the age of 28 supported the Vietnam War in greater numbers than their parents. These divisions continue to play out today.

^Freedman, Mervin B.; Powelson, Harvey (January 31, 1966). "Drugs on Campus: Turned On & Tuned Out". The Nation (New York: Nation Co. LP). pp. 125–127. Within the last five years the ingestion of various drugs has become widespread on the American campus.

^"A Social History of America's Most Popular Drugs". PBS.org [Frontline]. Retrieved April 23, 2014. from 1951 to 1956 stricter sentencing laws set mandatory minimum sentences for drug-related offenses. In the 1950s the beatniks appropriated the use of marijuana from the black hepsters and the drug moved into middle-class white America in the 1960s.

^"During the 1960s, Marcuse achieved world renown as "the guru of the New Left," publishing many articles and giving lectures and advice to student radicals all over the world. He travelled widely and his work was often discussed in the mass media, becoming one of the few American intellectuals to gain such attention. Never surrendering his revolutionary vision and commitments, Marcuse continued to his death to defend the Marxian theory and libertarian socialism." Douglas Kellner "Marcuse, Herbert"

^"Farrell provides a detailed history of the Catholic Workers and their founders Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin. He explains that their pacifism, anarchism, and commitment to the downtrodden were one of the important models and inspirations for the 60s. As Farrell puts it, "Catholic Workers identified the issues of the sixties before the Sixties began, and they offered models of protest long before the protest decade.""The Spirit of the Sixties: The Making of Postwar Radicalism" by James J. Farrell

^"Within the movements of the sixties there was much more receptivity to anarchism-in-fact than had existed in the movements of the thirties ... But the movements of the sixties were driven by concerns that were more compatible with an expressive style of politics, with hostility to authority in general and state power in particular ... By the late sixties, political protest was intertwined with cultural radicalism based on a critique of all authority and all hierarchies of power. Anarchism circulated within the movement along with other radical ideologies. The influence of anarchism was strongest among radical feminists, in the commune movement, and probably in the Weather Underground and elsewhere in the violent fringe of the anti-war movement." "Anarchism and the Anti-Globalization Movement" by Barbara Epstein

^Stewart Home. "The Assault on Culture: Utopian currents from Lettrisme to Class War". Introduction to the Lithuanian edition. (Ist edition Aporia Press and Unpopular Books, London 1988.) ISBN 978-0-948518-88-1. "In the sixties Black Mask disrupted reified cultural events in New York by making up flyers giving the dates, times and location of art events and giving these out to the homeless with the lure of the free drink that was on offer to the bourgeoisie rather than the lumpen proletariat; I reused the ruse just as effectively in London in the 1990s to disrupt literary events."